Mr. Money Mustache

A little-known fact about the MMM household is that Mrs. M. actually holds a real estate license. She got this a few years ago as a way to help us both explore our shared interest in houses (buying, selling, renting), and as a way to help a few customers to find homes in our area [...]

Imagine a device so advanced that it can keep any boy or man, from birth to beyond age 100, looking trim, clean and handsome for life. It can sculpt, trim, shape, or completely remove any hair on your body. It will save you hundreds of dollars and dozens of hours of time EVERY YEAR, forever. [...]

It’s the weekend, so that means we get to step back for a little bit of Philosophy instead of hard number-crunching. Today, I’ve prepared a little Story for you. One dark February night in 1992, the skinny teenaged version of Mr. Money Mustache was sitting alone on the La-Z boy chair in his parents’ living [...]

Mr. Money Mustache is a bit of a Natural Frugalist. For me, buying anything beyond groceries  is like giving birth, where there is great thought, planning, and nine months of physical stretching and pain involved before the actual wallet emerges slowly from the pocket. Because of this, I find that I spend very little when [...]

Despite the reputation Mrs. M and I are cultivating as extreme nonspenders, we do indulge in the ultimate luxury: being parents. Our lovely little boy brings us happiness and learning every day and as with all parents,  we feel the experience of parenthood is worth the cost. Whatever that cost might be. Hey.. what exactly [...]

Today is actually a special occasion – Mr. Money Mustache’s first Guest Posting on another blog. The wise and benevolent writer of the Early Retirement Extreme blog, a guy named Jacob who also retired in his early 30s and has been running that site for several years, allowed me to write a “hello” to his [...]

It has been a while since we did an MMM challenge, so I’ve got an extra good one for you today, one which can save many homeowners out there $105,000 over a 15-year period. The challenge is: Getting yourself a better rate on your mortgage. Looking at the ING Direct* website recently, I noticed that [...]

We’re diving into a fundamentally new field here – the field of actually increasing your income, which is quite different from the cutting your spending I usually advocate. For most people, the cutting works much better because they already have a shortage of free time, and a surplus of income compared to what is actually [...]

One of my secret tricks to figure out what activities are really worthwhile in life, is to look back to the Original and Ultimate Mustachians of this continent – the Native Americans. These were a people who lived together in a very rich culture which was based entirely on their natural environment. The animals and [...]

With this being Friday and all, I figure it’s a good time to address a tricky issue. A place where the Good Life we advocate here at MMM comes into direct conflict with optimizing your spending. That place is BEER, and other recreational drugs of your choice. Mr. Money Mustache definitely enjoys a good brew. [...]

Being a newcomer to the financial guru circle, Mr. Money Mustache decided to check out what his competitors have been saying  throughout historical times to see if they have their stories straight. So he spent a recent weekend listening, in full, to the audio book version of Dave Ramsey’s ultimate career work: the Total Money [...]

I must admit my title for this article sounds scandalous and scammy, like something a Las Vegas-based email spam company would send out. But it’s also completely accurate, because I really can teach you the best way to make money from the stock market all in one short blog post. Some of our readers are [...]

Just over ten years ago, I was happily living in my first house. This house was within easy biking distance of work (9 miles) and the grocery store (2 miles), and walking distance of the city’s Recreation Center (1 mile) which I enjoyed visiting for workouts about three times per week. I was especially pleased [...]

This week, Mr. Money Mustache was honored to answer more calls for help from his readers. There was one in particular who had an interesting situation, and was generous enough to let me share it with you (anonymously of course) after we were finished the email discussion. We’ll call the reader SAM – short for [...]

Aha! I see there is an imitator trying to cash in on Mr. Money Mustache’s fame. When biking home from the library today, I passed through the border where the nice Big Trees and Historic Buildings and Cafes part of town degrades to the regular free-for-all capitalism-and-urban-sprawl section which characterizes most of the country. And [...]

A few years ago, I made my weekly trip into the local library and did a little bit of browsing in the Getting Rich section of the bookshelves (I’m a big fan of the good ol’ 332.024 part of the Dewey Decimal system). I found an intriguing book called The Millionaire Next Door, The Surprising [...]

Happy Friday everyone. You probably feel pretty tired from the ambitious week of challenges we have done to this point, and perhaps you are still recovering from the complete and permanent loss of visits to Starbucks I imposed on you yesterday. So today, I thought we could take a break and I’ll let you in [...]

Editorial Note: Today I made a new logo to properly portray Mr. Money Mustache’s status as The MC of Personal Finance. Do you notice it at the top of the website now?  Ahh-scritch-Ahh-scritch-scriffy-tiffy-tifityAhh Yeah! … Now that readers are starting to fantasize about getting a little bit of this early retirement action for themselves, Mr. [...]

So far, I’ve complained about the excessive spending we do on cars, driving, gifts, cable TV, electricity.. all without even mentioning housing. Why? Housing is the biggest expense for most people, and there are some retirement/frugality/simple living blogs out there that advise you to live in an absolutely minimal house or even an RV. It [...]

With the feel-good articles of the Weekend Edition behind us, it’s time to get back to some hard numbers and some moneymakin’. After slicing your car expenses, which we’ve done a lot recently, one of the next big areas with room to simultaneously save money and preserve some clean breathing air is your electricity consumption. [...]

—- Introduction: Welcome to the first post by Mrs. Money Mustache herself. Long a lurker on this blog, she finally has some things to say to balance Mr. Money Mustache’s manly voice. —- There are many people that dream of retiring early.  I was never one of those people.  The idea of retirement in my [...]

It’s a warm and sunny day here at the Money Mustache Compound, and my little boy and his Mum are outside planting some new plants in an area of the backyard known as the Mother’s Day Garden. It all started one year when Mrs. M decided to tackle a certain back corner of the yard [...]

Wow, what a dramatic title! What could Mr. Money Mustache be talking about with a heading like that? It must be something pretty revolutionary. The prize for this week’s challenge is about Nine Thousand Dollars, plus getting the equivalent of about 36 weeks of extra vacation time each year. That would bring you up fairly [...]

Many people clicked “like” on the simplistic yet powerful challenge called Save $100 this Week. Did YOU do the challenge? I did, and now I’ve got more than $100 extra compared to what I would otherwise have. You DO know you have to actually do this stuff if you want to become wealthy, don’t you? [...]